This article is cross-posted from edtechtimes.com, where I currently serve as editor-in-chief.

Education technology company HotChalk announced the release of the HotChalk Education Index report at the Arizona State University/GSV EdInnovation Summit last Thursday, April 17. The HotChalk Education Index is based on the company’s analysis of more than 30 billion data points and 25,000 surveys collected during a 90 day window; representing teachers, parents, students, administrators and tutors from every wired country on the planet.

“Understanding our planet’s educational intent, from Internet users seeking education outcomes, is revolutionary,” explained Edward Fields, HotChalk Chairman & CEO. “The HotChalk Education Index helps education innovators, technologists, publishers and investors understand the online education market with unprecedented scale, depth and precision.”

The HotChalk Education Index is based on anonymized education data from the HotChalk Network, a proprietary collection of more than 160 education focused websites, serving more than 200 million pages of free content to 50 million unique visitors from around the world each month.

Some of the findings in HotChalk’s Q1 report include:

A mixed-bag on attitudes toward in-person/onsite and online education.  Both students and teachers in the survey seem to exhibit no preference towards in-person/onsite or online education.  This could be an indication that while the online education movement has great traction in the education media, its effects are still trickling down to the end users of the product, resulting in a state of no-preference.  As HotChalk continues to survey its users, it will be interesting to follow this question to see how attitudes towards in/person or online education may change over time.

The favorite price is still free.  While this information in itself is not surprising, the breakdown of paid content usage habits generates new questions about who pays for content and why.  A higher percentage of administrators describe themselves as either exclusively using paid content or using paid and free content equally than students and teachers.  A higher percentage of teachers describe themselves as exclusively or mostly using free content than students or administrators.  By digging deeper into this type of data and other statistics, product developers will have to decide whether to respond to expectations or challenge the status quo for these different user groups.

HotChalk will release the HotChalk Education Index quarterly providing data driven insights and surveys on topics including, free vs. paid education content; education technology efficacy; educator technology adoption rates; student access by geography; subject matter consumption rates; and more. The Index will be available for custom research projects beginning in Q3 2013.

For more information and to download a PDF copy of the report, visit www.educationinamerica.com.